An electric, water or natural gas utility company may manage hundreds of thousands or millions of metering devices located at customer sites. Such meters measure utility consumption and may be considered endpoints in a network, which may be configured as an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) for automated meter reading (AMR).
Updating the firmware on hundreds of thousands of endpoints is a daunting task. The volume of network activity caused by the update may result in problems for other network traffic, such as the transmission of metering data. Additionally, nodes having different revision levels of firmware operating at the same time may create compatibility or integration issues. And further, the longer such a process takes, the more battery power is consumed by many of the endpoints, which are not attached to the electric grid. Increased diversity of endpoints has resulted in more frequent firmware updates, and a firmware update for some endpoints may result in firmware changes for other endpoints.
Unfortunately, as advanced metering infrastructures have become more complex, known methods for providing a firmware update have not scaled well. Increasingly large periods of time must be devoted to such updates. Moreover, the updates and the time required to distribute them tend to reduce network bandwidth available for other purposes.